What glares as so bad? Seems fairly simple to me. Pause/Play, Next, Back. Clickable index, scalable display. Some of the buttons need hover tips, but it seems fairly usable.

As to the composition interface, I havn't a clue.

Posted by: James on May 19, 2003 03:52 PM

---

 

Try to use it if your sound card is disabled (as it is in my workplace). Take a paper screenshot of the screen and see if people can predict what the buttons will do.

Will it download more quickly if the audio is turned off?

It is impossible to step through all of the slide states (including the transitional ones), so you have to sit and wait for it to play at the pre-defined speed if you want to see everything.

Try printing a presentation.

Why doesn't it give you a clue about the total length of the presentation?

All of the buttons have one or two states apart from the minimise/maximise? button which has three states.

Try clicking on 11 in the outline and then click on 10 in the outline.

Posted by: Mac on May 20, 2003 07:01 AM

---

 

A sat a student infront of the presentation who had just completed basic windows and office trainging. So I consider her a fairly good baseline of the typical office worker or computer user. She correctly identified all but the view change button. While unscientific, I think that gave a fairly good recommendation to the iconography used. Considering it's standard on everything from media players, to DVD players and CD players.

Regarding sound and download, the question you ask is something a typical user wouldn't even think about, file size and optimizing download are more advanced user consideration. Real users measure things in more real life terms. This presentation downloaded fairly quickly on an average dialup connection, and my student seemed to think it fairly fast. That's all I'd be concerned about. Only us tech heads tend to

worry in any more detail.

Printing worked fine, I had to change the orientation but thats not suprising when you consider your trying to print something designed for the screen. I have a feeling if they could change the print orientation from within flash on print, they would but I believe that's a limitation of the browser more then of breeze.

Slide Sates, er.. well I can jump anywhere in the slide I'd like by clicking along the play line, just like in any media player. I do think there should be some markers along it to denote each important section and further subdivide it though. Again, not bad but room for improvement.

Presentation Length, agreed. Timing for each section would be nice as well, but it doesn't make the product harder to use, just less informative.

The state button seems to be one of the major usabilities issues, but the default view is a good and I consider it more of an advanced feature, most likely used by a presenter in a live demo, rather then something a fairly passive viewer will fiddle with. Agreed on improvements such as 3 small icons to represent each of the views though.

No arguments on the tooltip for nav. Suprised they didn't catch that one.

Overall thought I still found it more usable then not, I'd give it a B to B-, considering they are merging two different presentation styles (powerpoint/narrative video) I think they did well for version 1.

Room for improvement, but hardly not very usable, imho, and I'm hardly a softy on bad interafaces. Thanks for replying!

Posted by: James on May 20, 2003 11:00 AM

---